3 ms·
Genuine question, what better solution is there on the market at the moment? I like the idea of binary deltas and expansions if handled well, and I imagine a s
by parksy 11y ago
Genuine question, what better solution is there on the market at the moment?
I like the idea of binary deltas and expansions if handled well, and I imagine a service that makes it easy for developers to distribute in this way would be a goldmine.
- iainmerrick 11y agoI wish I knew! I've used Google Play, iTunes Connect (i.e. the App Store), the Amazon Appstore, and the Humble Mobile Bundle. iTunes Connect is overall a bit nicer to work with (but often fails with completely incomprehensible errors, usually involving certificates and code signing). The new "app slicing" thing Apple are rolling out sounds very good. On the downside, it's a very closed system. Apple don't want you to script or automate anything, they want you to use their tools, of which some are slick and some are very rough. Amazon's store is similar to Google Play but much worse overall. Their web app is very clunky. Good: no APK size limit, so no expansion files needed! Bad: big APKs need to be uploaded via SFTP(!??). No clever binary deltas or anything as far as I can tell, just massive uploads and downloads for everyone. In the Humble Bundle, a lot of the work is done manually. That sounds bad but they've actually been a real pleasure to work with. It's great when you're doing a Humble release of an existing game; do a few code tweaks if necessary, upload to Dropbox and mail them a link + hash. I don't think they do anything fancy in their back-end, though (and they probably don't have enough engineering capacity to do so). I'd be interested to hear how Steam compares.
- rdsnsca 11y agoThe MAS (Mac App Store) uses deltas for upgrades, and has for quite awhile. Sometimes a delta update will fail and you have to re-download the full app but thats rare.